Support Student Divestment at the University of California!

Tomorrow the Associated Students of the University of California Berkeley (ASUC) will cast its final vote on whether to divest from two corporations profiting from Israeli occupation and apartheid. This means that you have one last chance to support the divestment resolution by asking ASUC student senators to overturn their president’s veto of the resolution. Click here to send a message urging ASUC student senators to support divestment.

The battle for divestment at UC Berkeley is an important front in the struggle to hold corporations accountable for profiting from Israeli human rights abuses and violations of international law. As UC Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine declare,

Now is a time to recognize [this] movement, a movement not just at UC Berkeley but at schools and institutions around the country and the world, and to redouble our efforts to end the Israeli occupation and reassert the need for an ethical investment policy.

…This movement is not just about a victory for divestment at UC Berkeley. Rather it is more fundamentally about spreading divestment and the notion that all nations and corporations, including sacred cows like Israel, must be held to account for their gross violations of human rights, and that all people, Palestinians included, are deserving of basic human rights such as rights to life, property, freedom of movement, and a right to an education…

There are vibrant campus divestment campaigns in Arizona, Michigan, and Washington DC, among other places, and a victory at UC Berkeley will only further inspire these bold student activists. We aren’t the only ones who recognize the critical role of Berkeley’s divestment vote. Two weeks ago,American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Leadership Development Director Jonathan Kessler and notorious Zionist attack dog Alan Dershowitz called on their followers to “take over the [UC Berkeley] student government and reverse the vote.” Kessler and Dershowitz will be calling UC Berkeley student senators tonight; will you ensure that the student senators also hear reasoned arguments for divestment? Simply click here to send an email supporting divestment at UC Berkeley.

Watch this short video, showing AIPAC’s combative response to divestment at UC Berkeley. This is only further evidence that supporting campus BDS is the right move for human rights advocates.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has already sent his letter of support for UC Berkeley divestment, which in part reads:

In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime.

The same issue of equality is what motivates the divestment movement of today, which tries to end Israel’s 43 year long occupation and the unequal treatment of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government ruling over them. The abuses they face are real, and no person should be offended by principled, morally consistent, non-violent acts to oppose them. It is no more wrong to call out Israel in particular for its abuses than it was to call out the Apartheid regime in particular for its abuses.